


Spear or Sword

by ossseous (ozean)



Category: Cursed (TV)
Genre: Animal Death, Arthurian, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Gen, Hunting, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:09:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25475908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozean/pseuds/ossseous
Summary: Little Squirrel is at war with himself. Wrenched in half by knowing this man sleeps because he is healing and needs to rest--and therefore should not be bothered--and by also knowing that he is unfathomably bored.
Relationships: Lancelot & Percival (Cursed), The Weeping Monk & Squirrel
Comments: 8
Kudos: 168





	Spear or Sword

Little Squirrel is at war with himself. Wrenched in half by knowing this man sleeps because he is healing and needs to rest--and therefore should not be bothered--and by also knowing that he is unfathomably bored. Crouching, he picks among the detritus at the base of an oak, picking acorns from the twigs and leaves until his hands are packed full of his little treasures. And then, one by one, he tosses them into the nearby stream where they land with a satisfying plunk. The monk rarely stirs when he passes out and their path has been filled with intervals, endless hours on horseback followed by endless hours of the monk sleeping. And Squirrel being bored.

And Squirrel does what he can, trapping and hunting rabbits and fat little rats and cooking them over the fire. When Squirrel brings the monk his portion, he always checks that he hasn't drifted into some deadly fever by pressing a hand to his forehead. He doesn't really know what he is supposed to feel when he does it, but it is what his mother would do to him whenever he fell ill or got hurt bad enough, so he figures he will know it when he feels it--whatever "it" is.

The monk has long since eaten his portion though, and remains thanklessly asleep as usual. For a good moment Squirrel considers using the monk for his acorn tossing practice, but even he isn't that mean. So Squirrel does what he does best. He runs.

He doesn't run to any one place. There is a fleeting thought that he should just leave the monk there to die in the woods. After all, he has served a vile cause, hunted his own people. It would be a mercy for a man like that, to let him die peacefully in the quiet of the forest. But Squirrel owes him a debt all the same, and he isn't keen to grow into a man who ignores his debts.

So the running is more about getting rid of the energy that itches in his legs, begging to be set loose. He climbs small trees, he hides from make believe Paladins that he convinces himself are hiding in the brush. Birds trill and squirrels chitter angrily at the hurricane of motion he disrupts the quiet forest with. He bolts until he can hardly breathe and bounds into a clearing, eager to feel the sun on his face for the first time in days.

The deer in the clearing, enjoying its browsing and minding its own business, startles at Squirrel's intrusion. It peers at him with empty black eyes--utterly still, until the tension breaks and it determines Squirrel a non-threat with a flick of its tail. As if he weren't even there, staring at it, it returns to the feast of lichen at its feet. 

Something churns in his chest, an understanding that tries to worm its way into Squirrels thoughts. Standing there, watching a creature carry on with its life like the world isn't falling down around it, makes him miss home. Makes him miss when he didn't fear death, but a broken arm from falling from a tree. When Dewdenn was a calm but bustling village, relatively unscathed by the mounting tension of the world around them.

The thought is enough to deflate Squirrel considerably,, and he is just about to turn and amble his way back to their paltry example of a camp when a heavy thunk resounds through the silence of the wood. The deer takes only a few steps and crumples to the ground without a single bleat of agony, just an arrow buried in its eye. There is something so unmonumental about it that it takes a moment for Squirrel to realize what happened.

Frowning, Squirrel turns to the monk who half leans on a longbow, and half braces against a tree. 

"Why'd you have to go and do that?" Squirrel asks, bristling as the monk hobbles past, his horse following not far behind.

"I was tired of eating burnt rabbit," he says with a grunt as he traverses a fallen log. "Now help me."

Squirrel helps him field dress the carcass. It isn't the first time and surely won't be the last time he's had his arms elbow deep in another creature's stomach. The same actions that are mechanical for the monk are still clumsy for Squirrel. As bothered as Squirrel is for the interruption of his afternoon, he is overwhelmed by the promise of venison in his near future. His stomach has been cramping with hunger that little rodents can't easily please. When they are done and all the unnecessary bits discarded, they hoist remainders of the carcass onto the horse's hind. Neither of them do a graceful job of it. 

"Feeling better, I presume?" Squirrels asks, eyeing his annoyingly untalkative companion from under the horse's massive head. Well, massive to Squirrel at least.

The monk barely looks at him, just grabs the reins and limps his way back to the camp. Squirrel follows, filling in the silences with stories of the make believe enemies he vanquished and the battles he won all within that afternoon.  
  


* * *

"How'd you do that, anyway?" They are processing the backstrap, or at least the monk is. Having hung the carcass from a low branch, the monk stands at its ribs and shifts his weight from foot to foot, playing down all his pain. It is hard to hide the damage a flail can do to your bones, and Squirrel isn't deceived. For a moment though, Squirrel thinks he looks almost like the butcher that lived a few houses down from him in Dewdenn. 

Squirrel had been relegated to the utterly dull task of spearing meat on branches and hanging them by the fire, watching them as they shrink and dry. There are a few cuts for them to enjoy that evening, cooking on a flat rock nestled in the glowing coals. The monk forbade him from touching them with a sharp slap to his wrist when he tried to push them closer to the heat.

"Do what?" The monk rips a knife across the venison muscle, pulling tissue from the waxy fat, slicing the meat thin.

"Find me so fast, I mean." He adds a couple of small branches to the fire, it takes a couple of seconds, but they smoke and start to blacken from the coals. When the persistent quiet becomes too loud to go unnoticed, Squirrel looks up. The monk has stopped completely, his hands covered up to the wrists in the deer's blood, one rests on his thigh, his knife clenched tight in his fist.

He stares straight into Squirrel and it sends an uneasy jolt of nausea right into his diaphragm. There aren't many people he's met who are as intimate with death as the monk is. There are moments where Squirrel forgets that. Forgets that the monk isn't just another one of the older boys from his village that he always looked up to. The ones who always got to hunt and go to other villages. The ones that are more than likely dead now. By the monk's very hand no less.

"Why do you care?" The monk asks, only after a second does he return to his task, discarding some persistent fur that insists on clinging to the meat.

"Because you're one of us, right? Only I've never met one of us that could--" he stumbles a bit on the words.  _ Hunt? Track? Chase? What is it does he do besides run us down and kill us? _ "--trace us like that…"

"Met a lot of Fey in your long life, have you?" At this, the monk looks almost a little smug, not even bothering to look back at Squirrel. He finishes the last bits of processing, finally joining Squirrel with the last few cuts of meat to be hung. The first cuts they laid down by the fire will be done soon, but there will be a long evening of fire stoking for all the meat to get done and dry enough to pack.

"More than enough to know you're strange," he mumbles. He pokes at their cooking portions with a stick and the monk pssts him like he is some kind of cat. Feeling petulant, he tosses his stick in the woods and sends the monk one of his best looks of contempt.

For a moment Squirrel thinks the monk might just ignore his question completely, but once he settles down against the log he's claimed as his own, he speaks. "I just know. The land tells me. I can feel them--you."

"So the earth… talks to you?" Squirrel eyes the meat but the monk is looking more and more like he is about to settle down into another annoyingly long sleep.

"No, it's not that simple." The monk says it like Squirrel might be the stupidest person in the world, but when Squirrel glances over to him, the monk's arms are crossed over his chest and his eyes have already drifted shut. Squirrel decides to take pity on him and drop it for tonight.

Instead he opts to take advantage of the monk's little nap and push the meat deeper in the fire, but before he can even leverage a stick under the rock to move it, the monk growls out a "leave it" and Squirrel groans and pelts that stick into the woods as well.


End file.
